High Country News August 25, 2008
Feature
The Mog Squad
In the quest for the ultimate firefighting machine, the BLM in Nevada has turned to some very big, very strange, and very foreign vehicles.
Editor's Note
Fire, fire everywhere
Despite the growing threat of Western wildfire, most of us are still pretending it will go away if we just ignore it.
Dear Friends
Dear friends
Summer visitors; correction; HCN stories win awards; wilderness loses a friend: a farewell to John Seiberling
Writers on the Range
Not even the privileged can deter a porcupine
Judy Muller contemplates the porcupine, which is wreaking havoc in ritzy Telluride Mountain Village.
News
McCain: T.R. or W?
John McCain likes to compare himself to Teddy Roosevelt, but his conservation record is closer to that of a less-popular Republican: George W. Bush.
Riparian repair
River restorationists tackle the Clark Fork River near Milltown, Mont., in a project that demonstrates how hard it is to revive a damaged waterway.
Dust on the rocks
The results of a scientific study on the effects of dust on rock art are somehow “lost” in the haze of Barrett Corporation’s drilling in Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon.
Fifty summers and 360 degrees
Nancy Hood has spent 50 summers watching for fires from lookouts in the smoky Siskiyou Mountains of Northern California.
All along the watchtower
Andrew McNair, who works weekends at a computer in Olympia, Wash., is not your typical Western fire watcher.
Book Reviews
An unforgettable journey
In his second novel, So Brave, So Young, So Handsome, Leif Enger takes the reader on a journey across the American West, circa 1915.
Portrait of a threatened land
In Travels in the Greater Yellowstone, Jack Turner celebrates and fights for the preservation of an incredible but endangered landscape.
Essays
The old man and the stream
A brief encounter with an elderly fisherman moves W.S. Robinson to think about the mysteries of life and death -- and fathers and sons.
Two Weeks in the West
Two weeks in the West
Forest Service blows its wad on a mixed fire season in the West; solar power plants and wind farms may help take the heat off; fire sale of energy leases on Colorado’s Roan Plateau.
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